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Solidarity against online harassment

One of our colleagues has been the target of a sustained campaign of harassment for the past several months. We have decided to publish this statement to publicly declare our support for her, for every member of our organization, and for every member of our community who experiences this harassment. She is not alone and her experience has catalyzed us to action. This statement is a start.

The Tor Project works to create ways to bypass censorship and ensure anonymity on the Internet. Our software is used by journalists, human rights defenders, members of law enforcement, diplomatic officials, and many others. We do high-profile work, and over the past years, many of us have been the targets of online harassment. The current incidents come at a time when suspicion, slander, and threats are endemic to the online world. They create an environment where the malicious feel safe and the misguided feel justified in striking out online with a thousand blows. Under such attacks, many people have suffered — especially women who speak up online. Women who work on Tor are targeted, degraded, minimized and endure serious, frightening threats.

This is the status quo for a large part of the internet. We will not accept it.

We work on anonymity technology because we believe in empowering people. This empowerment is the beginning and a means, not the end of the discussion. Each person who has power to speak freely on the net also has the power to hurt and harm. Merely because one is free to say a thing does not mean that it should be tolerated or considered reasonable. Our commitment to building and promoting strong anonymity technology is absolute. We have decided that it is not enough for us to work to protect the world from snoops and censors; we must also stand up to protect one another from harassment.

It's true that we ourselves are far from perfect. Some of us have written thoughtless things about members of our own community, have judged prematurely, or conflated an idea we hated with the person holding it. Therefore, in categorically condemning the urge to harass, we mean categorically: we will neither tolerate it in others, nor will we accept it among ourselves. We are dedicated to both protecting our employees and colleagues from violence, and trying to foster more positive and mindful behavior online ourselves.

Further, we will no longer hold back out of fear or uncertainty from an opportunity to defend a member of our community online. We write tools to provide online freedom but we don't endorse online or offline abuse. Similarly, in the offline world, we support freedom of speech but we oppose the abuse and harassment of women and others. We know that online harassment is one small piece of the larger struggle that women, people of color, and others face against sexism, racism, homophobia and other bigotry.

This declaration is not the last word, but a beginning: We will not tolerate harassment of our people. We are working within our community to devise ways to concretely support people who suffer from online harassment; this statement is part of that discussion. We hope it will contribute to the larger public conversation about online harassment and we encourage other organizations to sign on to it or write one of their own.

I think part of this discussion is about exactly this question: how much should Tor focus on just writing code that enables other people to do things to make the world better, vs how much should Tor use its reputation and context to make the world better in other ways. There are no perfect answers here, but I think we're setting some more data points as we move forward with blog posts like this one.

For me, it is less about striking a balance between the two than integrating them--they comprise a virtuous circle.

Some Tor people articulate to the world the stakes we all face with mass surveillance; others at Tor build tools that allow privacy online. Some do both.

When millions of people are willing to give away their rights because they "have nothing to hide," Tor people publicly discuss the implications of this view on a free society and send a message that mass surveillance is not normal or inevitable and it can and must be stopped.

Just as importantly, Tor doesn't just talk about the problem--it helps to fix the problem.

Another organization might put out white papers all day long or make software unconnected to the real life risks of users. Many do. Not Tor.

That's the first thing I liked about Tor. They see the problem deeply--they talk to human rights activists every day, for instance---and they are literally, hands-on, working to fix it. Powerful and inspiring. - Katie

In addition to finding the magic line between "producing and supporting anonymity-enabling software" vs "trying to improve the world is other ways", it's important to realize that this statement is signed by individuals. Yes, The Tor Project stands behind this message, but the individual who signed it (some employees, some contractors, many volunteers, most supporters of the project) are the ones who are making a statement against harassment and who are unwilling to tolerate it anymore.

Tor, itself, is already very political, but for other reasons. This statement simply adds to the discomfort oppressors associate with Tor.

History is not a smooth continuum of a move from prejudice to tolerance. If anything, to borrow a term from our discipline, history is a process of simulated annealing. We are constantly in search of a better local maxima for ourselves, our communities, and our countries. Discrimination is nothing new. Harassment is a familiar condition. Bigotry is hardly novel. But I contend that humanity –is- improving.

What is new are the ways in which the emergence of a world-wide online community has enabled discussion, both for and against these old evils. I am pleased to see that for every voice that has come out in support of the old order, the hegemonic misogyny and racism so casual about itself that it fails to even understand the meaning of those words, there have been voices raised in opposition.

Community leaders, scholars, religious leaders, politicians, social workers, activists, and more have taken a step forward to be heard. They tell stories about life now and about how life could be, and they bring the perspective of those marginalized into the open. In this way, we hear about life for persons of color, for women, for GLBT members of our communities. Many of the voices come from these people, but many come from those who enjoy society’s more privileged statuses.

We are witnessing the backlash to the bravery of all of these voices. Hatred fights back to cling to its old notions of power. Gamergate, police violence against people of color, transphobia, the institutionalized denial of equal rights to millions of our citizens because they don’t conform – all of these are real. When vested in politics, hatred can be surprisingly clinical. When it takes the form of online death threats, street harassment, and police brutality, it is visceral, ugly, and often, all too effective.

I do not speak for the whole of my community – I cannot pretend to have that kind of authority to substitute my voice for the voices of those whose departures from society’s idea of ‘the norm’ are so much more visible and public. I do not face a daily struggle in light of my differences. But I will put my voice together with the voices of those who are fighting this struggle. I refuse to ignore the conflict, I refuse to pretend it does not exist, and I refuse to think I have no power to affect it. My colleagues, my students, and my community will know that I stand in support of those who have no choice but to participate, by virtue of society’s ill-conceived notions.

Most recently, I came across this page in support of its contributors, some of whom have been harassed online simply because they had the audacity to be female, in tech, and participating in a project that already draws a lot of controversy. I have met both Roger and Nick at talks before – although I know neither of them personally. I’m not acquainted with the other members of the TOR community personally, but I have no reason to think them any less –persons- for that. They, and all other people, deserve a minimum standard of human rights, respect, and empowerment.

To all those who would oppose that, I have a simple message: You will not win this fight. The world will not allow it. If you want to remain in ignorance, you have every right to, but when you inflict your ugly ignorance on others, we will resist you.

A good post. I would sign this petition. However, I find the tag feminism misleading. In my opinion it looks like men were to blame for most of the harassment on the web. So I cannot sign this statement.

I agree harassment is not a constructive way to resolve value differences and it shows the value of the offender. Thanks to all of the TOR project staff and volunteers for their great work.

The bullying and sly misrepresentation designed to raise armies of trolls against Tor developers is only the latest in a pattern.

There's a longish history over the last few years of bullying, aggressive baiting misrepresentation, implicit apologia for state power, and general noxiousness on the part of Mark Ames, Paul Carr, and Yasha Levine.

I first saw them attack IP abolitionists. Then they went after libertarians. Then they went after anarchists. Now they're coming after the entire hacker community.

For years, I have advocated using one's real name on the Internet except when there is a very good reason for a pseudonym or to be anonymous. Also, for year or so, I had a Tor node on one of my computers.

My reason for advocating transparency in how we represent ourselves is that the lack of transparency allows people to behave worse than they otherwise would. But being visible is not always wise.

Sometimes, to say what needs to be said or to publish what needs to be read, we must conceal our names, our identities, our habits, or locations. Tor is a key tool that allows for Internet freedoms in an increasingly repressive era.

While the Internet is an unprecedented means of expression and communication, it is also a giant failed social experiment. Harassment has become one of the dominant modes of Internet behavior.

Tools like Tor, while necessary for the protection of our freedom of expression, can be used in the service of harassment.

Please respect these tools for what they are: tools that allow ordinary people to resist repression. The best way to encourage respect for these vital tools is to call for a change in social norms such that mobbing, harassment, cyberbullying and such are clearly no longer acceptable.

Harassment poisons schools, organizations, communities, politics. There is no ideological difference too small for someone to decide you need to be purged and use harassment to accomplish it. The collateral damage to our culture and our organizations is huge.

If a community is going to be subject to harassment, there is a responsibility of members to support each other and a need to assert a vision of what the community's expectations are. There are certainly people who might not always have had positive influences in their lives displaying a standard what is decent behavior. Tor has a leadership role in the community, people look up to the project and personalities involved. I appreciate that it is exercising its position in a constructive manner.

This is also a moment of reflection for even those who aren't necessarily intolerant to examine their own behavior. I have seen decent people resort to less decent practices in their communications with other members of the community. We could all do well to check ourselves. Tor is heavily moderating these comments. Only propaganda gets through. I view my participation as a commitment for self-examination as much as it is a rejection of another group's nonsense.

Furthermore, when Tor is at times misused by malicious parties for abusive behavior elsewhere, this reaffirms that support for freedom expression does not mean support for violence against others.

I hope this is a first step in a continuing engagement on harassment for Tor and all the signatories of this letter.

I support this 100% because why should people hide in fear on the Internet just because people can be anonymous and say such terrible unjustified things to other people. The Internet's suppose to bring people together, not tear them apart.

Speaking out against harassment, online harassment in this case is important. I'm not certain, but I hope it is alright to assume that those who have said that (online) harassment of females is to be spoken out against would also say that (online) harassment against anyone, anywhere is to be spoken out against.

I had problems with how some things in the statement are put, including their order and the reason why the statement has been made in the first place.

Anyway, I put my name under it. The issue is important. It's a social issue.

Reading through these comments, there have been several people asking what solidarity in this context exactly means. To me, solidarity means that you will use your own voice, and whatever specific inter-personal opportunities that you may have, to state that certain behavior is not accepted.

I challenge myself, and I challenge all of you to speak up against harassment by whatever means you can, whenever you see it.

I'll wrap this up with something I think Jake said, "You should use your privilege to help other people." I'm sure if we all think hard enough, we can find the ways in our lives that we are privileged and use that privilege improve the lives and treatment of others.

I would like to thank the Tor developers for all the hard work they do for us, and hope that they continue to do so for a long time to come.

This kind of harassment of those who would help us be safer, more secure, in this modern era of state surveillance is wholly unacceptable. Which is why this is a good idea - a public statement of "Fuck off mate, harassing tor devs ain't cool.".

So basically you are willing to protect every harassing party on the planet, but when it happens to one of your own all of a sudden you are jumping on the sjw bandwagon. Predictable but still kind of ironic.

There's a difference between the technical protections that Tor provides -- which we are absolute on maintaining for all because it's the only way to provide it for the people who need it -- and how we wish people behaved in the world.

In particular, this statement is not about removing protection from certain parties. It's about how we're now planning to stand up and participate and discuss and engage with the topic of harassment and not stand quietly by, hoping somebody else will deal with it.

It seems as though readers are taking a stand against on-line "harassment" without knowing even the smallest details about this particular harassment series of events: IMHO a few details of the events of harassment should be expressed before people sign on to voice solidarity against it.

Thank you for starting this new trend of an old Internet tradition of dealing with and confronting online abuse. This is not a gender issue, even if more women are harassed online (and I'm not sure that is the case). It's a people issue and an ethical issue. Looking forward to seeing this motion develop!

Thank you to Tor for standing up to this online abuse. Freedom of speech and the right to privacy are fundamental civil liberties. But using "freedom of speech" and "privacy" as a shield to hide behind and a licence to harass others and destroy their reputations is the exact opposite of civil liberty - it is despicable and cowardly and must be confronted.

I abhor the harassment of anyone involved with the creation or running of Tor, and I don't do it along sexist lines. Harassment is harassment... period. However, having read the comments, some posters seem to be of the opinion that they can use the primary subject to further their own moralistic judgments. That worries me. So can we stick to the primary objective and not muddy the waters with 'free speech' and 'civil liberties'. Those are interpretable... harassment is not.

I understand that the identities of various individuals have been tied up one way or the other in this debacle. And that makes it all the more difficult to resolve this debacle cleanly.

Arma - I implore you to think of the voices who have been intimidated into silence. There has been a substantial amount of SWATing and blackmailing and jobs lost due to falsified claims of pedophilia/drug use/violent behavior being phoned in. Much of this harassment with real world consequences has been solely against one side of the 4 month long drama. And it's the side that has gotten the least amount of opportunity to speak their side.

I implore you - please investigate for yourself the claims that have been made. Please investigate the harassment that your coworker stated to you. There has been a contingent of trolls intent on harassing individuals in the tech industry while posing as a member of the video gaming community in order to inflame passions even more.

I am so exhausted....4 months trying to find a way to get across that video gamers are not at war with feminism and no one wants to hear it. It's just trolls sending gore pics and death threats to each side while pretending to be the other. It's the primary reason this debacle has lasted for so long.

I truly am sorry for you having to put up with this sort of thing - It is wrong!

The terribly ironic thing is that I use TOR often because I too get harassed. Usually for defending those who are getting harassed. So I know the feeling as I have several times been the subject of concerted attacks. It is the mob mentality and aided by anonymity.

You end up bitter and with a very low opinion of humanity.

Censorship is wrong when it is only a matter of free speech, but when it is preventing others from their free speech, or being used to intentionally hurt others, then censorship is a necessary evil. I do not say that lightly either, but it is the result of the only debate I ever lost. I supported free speech in that debate, and free access to the sum of all human knowledge. I thought this was a good ideal, but lost when I was asked if that meant did I believe in free access to bomb-making knowledge and child porn for anyone who wants it? Of course I did not believe in that and so I had to concede defeat. Free access for all, to everything is a great ideal, but not practical sadly. So censorship is a necessary evil and TOR needs to protect it's helpers.

I realize I am not "in the loop" here, but WHY would anyone want to harass anyone who was working to help us anyway? Are their misogynistic feelings so strong that they want to hurt something like TOR, or do they consider they do not need TOR as they are such l33t haxors and can used hacked accounts, etc?

Anyways, I strongly disagree with some of the things you've said, regarding censorship being necessary.

>being used to intentionally hurt others, then censorship is a necessary evil.
Censorship is not a necessary evil when all "intentionally hurt" involves someone being a douche on the internet. Plus, what one person calls harrassment, another person called confrontation. I do not wish to censor you, even though some of the things you have said are rude, and downright dangerous.

>I do not say that lightly either, but it is the result of the only debate I ever lost.
Heh.

If you supported free speech in a debate, then someone came up with the obligatory argument "what if someone uses it for evil?", and then you buckle, you must not have been in many serious debates before, have you? "Greater good" is a thing, you know.

>I thought this was a good ideal, but lost when I was asked if that meant did I believe in free access to bomb-making knowledge and child porn for anyone who wants it?
Free speech is black or white. You either give it to everyone, or risk it being lost for everyone. It's also not nearly as simplistic as you make it out to be. Bomb-making information can be sought out for a wide variety of reasons, not all malicious. For example, learning how to stay safe around explosives, or even how to detect/disarm explosives. There is no way whatsoever to selectively censor people who look for information on pyrotechnics who plan to use it for "evil" purposes, yet simultaneously allow access to those who have a benign motive. The same goes for child porn. What is child porn in one country is legal in another. The overwhelming majority of what goes for child porn online is jailbait, nudist beaches, and public sexting, all of which do not need to involve abuse. Child porn involving rape is comparatively quite rare. Furthermore, far more children have been removed from dangerous homes because people failed to censor (real) child porn, simply due to people noticing it, reporting it, and recognizing the victim. Censoring mere evidence (as well as censoring massive collateral) is not the answer. The same applies to censoring information that has the potential to be used dangerously. Now of course, I wish the world was perfect, where children do not get abused, and bombs are never used for evil, but that is not possible, so we must make a choice for the greater good.

“The true test of someone who claims to believe in Freedom of Speech is whether they tolerate speech which they disagree with, or even find disgusting.”
- The Freenet Project

>WHY would anyone want to harass anyone who was working to help us anyway? Are their misogynistic feelings so strong that they want to hurt something like TOR
I believe the harrassment was not because of "misogynistic feelings" (which are actually quite rare). It's very possible that this is an attack on Tor developers, and the attackers are using sexism as a tool, not as a motivation. In the real world, people tend not to attack random female devs because they have "misogynistic feelings", unless you consider bored trolls who just want a reaction.

>It's Tor, not TOR.
Yes, according to Tor, but in another post I pointed out that as an English major it always appears as TOR in my mind as that is what I was taught was the correct form for an acronym.

>Anyways, I strongly disagree with some of the things you've said, regarding censorship being necessary.

And I strongly disagree with yours sadly.

>Censorship is not a necessary evil when all "intentionally hurt" involves someone being a douche on the internet. Plus, what one person calls harrassment, another person called confrontation. I do not wish to censor you, even though some of the things you have said are rude, and downright dangerous.

Respectfully disagree entirely. Confrontation is about challenging someone's beliefs, harassment is about insults, degrading, etc the person. You have just proved my point in doing this.

>>I do not say that lightly either, but it is the result of the only debate I ever lost.
>Heh.

Thank you! That childish comment proves to everyone you are trolling and so can be ignored from here on.

Point by point rebuttal of your post does not continue, as we know now that you are only trolling. Perhaps because I stand up for others you are wishing to take me on also? Another sign of your immaturity-Picking unnecessary fights to apparently prove something to others about oneself. You have certainly proved a lot; to many with your post.

I do not believe in total free speech, there must be some constraints in a civilized and safe society. That was the point I was trying to make about having to concede in that debate. Play tautological games, and define you own description for freer speech than we have now, but not without some control of the most gross and crass. Those are my beliefs and is there a fault in my logic? Calling for someone to be harmed is not acceptable as "free speech" for most people, myself included.

>>Heh.
>Thank you! That childish comment proves to everyone you are trolling and so can be ignored from here on.
Well, that's convenient. You can't rebut their arguments, so you say they're trolling (because they used the word "heh", so you must have been pretty desperate to find a reason), and end it there.
(not the guy who made the original reply.)

Good post, but just to be clear, people should still be free to say whatever the hell they want, including what is hateful and abusive. It may be wrong, but they should be free to, right?
Otherwise I am worried.

If we're going to create and grow an Internet that supports humans, it must provide room and safe space for discourses beyond white western men and their xboxes.

As important as any net neutrality reform, as important as any technical move that better preserves privacy, is a move toward self-examination and the creation of caring social structures that support, attend to, and amplify diverse, respectful discourse -- judging the success of our technology not by its theoretical elegance of profitability, but by its impact on the lives of those who use it.

Thank you for having your colleague's back, my back, and the backs of my sisters, my brothers, and my friends. Human decency is the coolest. Please let me know how I can lend a hand to make this go big.

Thank you to the entire Tor Project for your hard work, and for standing together against the kind of abuse your colleague was subjected to. I'm proud to join the great names on the list above and speak out in solidarity.

I would be happy to add my name to this statement. I like the focus on endorsing free speech, while not considering that speech is inconsequential in its potential to do harm (and without calling for curtaining of speech itself as a solution). Similarly, while no one should be the subject of state sanction for mere speech, it does not mean they should be not judged by others for what they say, or given platforms to promote abusive speech.

I am committed to building privacy-friendly and abuse resistant technologies, and would be happy to help others interested in such projects.

* Several GCHQ presentations on "information operations" (disinformation, psyops) targeting individuals and groups, including at least two of the signatories listed above (Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald)

* An NSA memo on arma's talk at NSA (they wanted him to tell them how to subvert Tor; it is apparent from the memo that they didn't learn anything helpful for their evil plan, and the memo even appears to make at least one elementary technical mistake about Tor)

* Several NSA and GCHQ presentations on operations targeting Tor and Tails (notably, one slide show reports "severe" problems subverting Tails, which was in fact at that time still remotely vulnerable to the later discovered Shellshock bug, if I understand correctly, in which case we should believe the generally duplicitous officials at NSA when they say they didn't know about Shellshock only because of the Snowden leaks!)

Also useful are these resources on surveillance-as-a-service companies:

Note also the parallel between the role of pseudo-journalistic ringleaders here and that of Milo Yiannopoulos in GamerGate. More recently, there does seem to have been more genuine crossover between the two groups:

Recent Updates

Hi! There's a new alpha release available for download. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.3.3.2-alpha from the usual place on the website. Packages should be available over the coming weeks, with a new alpha Tor Browser release some time in February.

Remember, this is an alpha release: you should only run this if you'd like to find and report more bugs than usual.

Tor 0.3.3.2-alpha is the second alpha in the 0.3.3.x series. It introduces a mechanism to handle the high loads that many relay operators have been reporting recently. It also fixes several bugs in older releases. If this new code proves reliable, we plan to backport it to older supported release series.

Changes in version 0.3.3.2-alpha - 2018-02-10

Major features (denial-of-service mitigation):

Give relays some defenses against the recent network overload. We start with three defenses (default parameters in parentheses). First: if a single client address makes too many concurrent connections (>100), hang up on further connections. Second: if a single client address makes circuits too quickly (more than 3 per second, with an allowed burst of 90) while also having too many connections open (3), refuse new create cells for the next while (1-2 hours). Third: if a client asks to establish a rendezvous point to you directly, ignore the request. These defenses can be manually controlled by new torrc options, but relays will also take guidance from consensus parameters, so there's no need to configure anything manually. Implements ticket 24902.

Major bugfixes (netflow padding):

Stop adding unneeded channel padding right after we finish flushing to a connection that has been trying to flush for many seconds. Instead, treat all partial or complete flushes as activity on the channel, which will defer the time until we need to add padding. This fix should resolve confusing and scary log messages like "Channel padding timeout scheduled 221453ms in the past." Fixes bug 22212; bugfix on 0.3.1.1-alpha.